1. Course Introduction

• Introductions and course logistics
• Course objectives

2. Introduction to vSphere 6.5

• vSphere 6.5 feature enhancements
• Use vSphere Client, VMware Host Client, and the appliance shell of vCenter Server Appliance

3. Installation and Upgrade

• New vCenter Server architecture features
• Choose between a distributed configuration and an embedded configuration based on your requirements
• Enhancements to vCenter Server Appliance
• Center Server Appliance deployment
• Hardware requirements for installing vCenter Server Appliance
• Information that is needed before you begin the installation
• Deploy a Platform Services Controller appliance
• How to upgrade vCenter Server Appliance 5.x to vCenter Server Appliance 6.5
• How to upgrade an ESXi 5.x host to an ESXi 6.5 host
• Benefits of using the content library
• Create a basic content library
• Synchronize a content library across vCenter Server instances

4. Compute Enhancements

• Enhancements to vSphere 6.5 scalability and performance
• Additional features to support hot-plug and SMART solid-state drives
• New capabilities of host profiles introduced in vSphere 6.5
• Improvements to lockdown settings
• Addition of smart-card authentication
• Changes that enhance user accountability
• How virtual hardware 12 extends virtual machine resource configurations
• How using large receive offload reduces CPU-associated costs for network packet processing
• How hot-add memory is distributed across NUMA nodes in vSphere 6.5

5. Storage Enhancements

• Benefits of using VMFS 6 with vSphere
• Upgrade from VMFS 5 to VMFS 6
• Benefits of using VMFS 6 with vSphere
• Benefits of using NFS v4.1 with vSphere
• Differences between NFS v3 and NFS v4.1
• Implications of using NFS v4.1
• Advantages of the new VMware Virsto on-disk file system
• Advantages of the vsanSparse snapshot format
• Advantages of fault domains to withstand rack-local failures
• Benefits of applying different default policies to different VMware Virtual SAN™ datastores
• Benefits of using virtual volumes
• Virtual machine, policy-based policy management
• How VMDK data operations are offloaded to storage arrays through the use of VMware vSphere® API for Storage Awareness™

6. Network Enhancements

• Work with Network I/O Control
• Upgrade Network I/O Control to version 3
• Enable network resource management on VMware vSphere® Distributed Switch™
• Configure bandwidth allocation for system and virtual machine traffic based on shares and reservations.
• IPv6 support in vSphere 6.5

7. Management Enhancement

• Core security modules that are part of Platform Services Controller
• VMware certificate management components
• Certificate use changes in vSphere 6.5
• Certificate management components that are part of Platform Services Controller
• Primary services provided by the VMware Certificate Authority component
• Primary services provided by the VMware Endpoint Certificate Store component
• VMware CA certificate replacement options
• ESXi certificate replacement options
• Certificate-based guest authentication

8. Availability Enhancements

• New TCP/IP stack for vSphere vMotion
  Changes that make vSphere vMotion migrations across high-latency networks possible
• Requirements for migrating a virtual machine across vCenter Server instances
• How VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance supports virtual machines with multiple virtual CPUs
• How vSphere Fault Tolerance maintains the secondary virtual machine in a ready state
• Mechanism by which the primary virtual machine is determined
• Improvements made in handling all paths down and permanent device lost conditions
• Increased scalability of vSphere HA
• Additional compatibility supported by vSphere HA

9. Security Enhancements

• Plan for secure boot support for ESXi host
• Deploy enhanced vCenter Server events and alarms, and vSphere logging
• virtual machine encryption
• Enable encrypted vSphere vMotion
• Use encrypted core dumps